Americans
are falling out of love with marital bliss. Look at the data. As of
2010, only 51 percent of Americans 18 or older were married, compared
with 72 percent in 1960. Exacerbated by a weak job market, the drop is
starker still among the young. Today, just a fifth of Americans ages 18
to 29 have a spouse, down from roughly three-fifths in 1960. The number
of marriages performed in the United States fell by 5 percent from 2009
to 2010, according to the Pew Research Center. That was partly the
result of a sagging economy, but it also represents an acceleration of
longer-term trends seen in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere in
the developed world.

Americans aren't starry-eyed anymore about
marriage as an aspiration. Roughly four of every 10 Americans told the
Pew center in 2010 that they thought matrimony was becoming obsolete.
It's certainly no longer a necessary station on the route to adulthood.
Millions of educated young Americans now buy homes and sock away money
for retirement, all without a wedding ring or even a significant other.
Nor does child-rearing need the imprimatur of marriage: More than half
the women under age 30 who give birth in the United States are single.

The
traditional path of marriage, homeownership, and children--strictly in
that order--is no longer regarded as de rigueur. This has left Americans
more choices in how to live their lives--to cohabit instead of to marry,
to have children with or without a partner, to remain single and live by
themselves. One in four Americans are now going it alone, as described
in the title of a new book by New York University sociologist Eric
Klinenberg, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

All
of this has made marriage rarer, something that not everyone needs--or
wants. Yet, paradoxically, it has become all the more important. At a
time when two incomes are often necessary for a middle-class lifestyle,
marriage can matter a lot. Years ago, most men, even those with only a
high school degree, could settle down, buy a home, support a family, and
lead some semblance of a middle-class life. Such economic security is
gone for lower-income, less-educated, or working-class Americans,
especially if they lack a college education. It's tough for any single
person, male or female, regardless of educational attainment, to be
assured of supporting a family.

"If marriage goes well now, it can
help people out economically," said Stephanie Coontz, a professor of
history and family studies at Evergreen State College. "But it's also a
riskier investment. Are you going to get saddled with a guy who can't
hold down a job?"

Even as fewer people marry overall, a
demographic divergence has emerged. Increasingly, marriage is more
common among college graduates than among Americans with less education.
Roughly 69 percent of adults who finished college are married,
according to Pew, compared with 56 percent of those without a college
degree.

For educated women, the prospects for marriage have
improved considerably. They now marry with greater frequency, while
feeling less pressure to conform to a 1950s domestic ideal. In 1960,
according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, 29 percent
of college-educated women in their sixties had never married; now, only 8
percent of them stay single. Well-educated women tend to marry later
than others do, but they stay married longer and report higher levels of
marital satisfaction.

College grads may marry later than the rest
of the population, yet more of them wind up settling down--and with one
another. Increasingly, Americans are choosing spouses like themselves.
In 1970, according to the Pew Center's data, only 37 percent of married,
college-educated men had a wife with a bachelor's degree; by 2007, 71
percent of them did. A middle-class fellow with a typical salary and a
401(k) plan seeks out a woman with a similar economic profile. Same goes
for the working-class or poorer couples. Gone are the days when the
Harvard grad marries the girl with the high school degree simply
because, well, she's pretty.

Marriage, as a result, now offers
fewer people a boost up the economic ladder. Stop and think what this
means for the growing inequality in Americans' incomes over the next
decade or more. If well-educated people with good jobs marry one
another, they'll have a better shot at saving money and accumulating
wealth. Less-educated, lower-income couples may stick together, but
their lack of schooling means they're both more likely to struggle to
find work, and they'll have sparser resources to fall back on if one of
them loses a job.

Then consider the impact on the next generation.
Well-educated, wealthy Americans will have more resources to spend on
their children's education, health, and enrichment; low-income people
can offer fewer opportunities to help their offspring get ahead.

"The
big losers within the marriage data are children who are increasingly
raised with fewer resources," said Michael Greenstone, a Massachusetts
Institute of Technology economist and a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, which has published several studies on marriage. "If you
want to get a little grandiose, it undermines the social fabric of the
country that rests on the idea that everyone has an equal chance at
success."